Solid state is all right in certain circumstances, but I always treat it as a suspect drive about to fail. I'm loathe to put anything of value on one, but they can be great as drives dedicated to caching... well, anything that uses caching. They're perfect for that. Anything else, no thanks.
And the price per unit storage could stand to come down a bit, too. It's a lot better than a few years ago, but still not reasonable in most cases.

Me: No I mean your drives and optical discs are all about to burn in a fire.

You: How is this different than any other time?

Really? I think what you mean is that you treat all media as if it *could* fail at any time, and hopefully not simultaneously. If I treated all media as if it was about to fail, I would spend all my time driving to Fry's to buy more hard drives until I ran out of money.

For example, I thought a program (Paperbak) that printed out binary files with ECC would be the answer because paper tends to be a resilient medium. Boy, was I wrong. I never could get scans to ever work with that program, no matter what DPI and ECC combinations I used.

I think there is still a niche for a program that can print out binary files with ECC. It is always good to use different medium types anyway, because invariably, one will fail.

There's no such thing as 'reliable tape' and there never has been. There's a reason so many companies have moved to disk based backups. Tape drives fail in ways that aren't detectable until you need to read that tape in another drive.
The only reason tape was such a dominant backup medium for so long was cost.

Dunno about my ][e floppies since I don't have anything that read those, but my C64 floppies seem to be fine after about 25-30 years. But then again, density is so low you can almost see the sectors themselves.

SSD is very useful, but because it can't be recovered like a spinning disk with a clean room, there has to be more of a focus on backups.

What might be ideal would be a hard disk controller card that can do RAID 1, but asynchronously. This way, the writes hit the SSD and go on, while being buffered to the HDD to write when it gets around to it. Of course, there would have to be something for consistency (a large battery backed up RAM buffer that will block the I/O on the SSD when it fills up), but this mig

The failure rate of SSDs is a third of that of HDDs and HDDs can also fail catastrophically. It surprises me that anyone would run a PC without an SSD as their OS driver, the speed difference is night and day.

I disassembled one that quit working and had to resolder the flash chip due to stress cracking. I did fix that. Then I reinforced the USB connector with solder and metal filled epoxy (inert). Then I cast fumed silica bearing epoxy around it in a custom mold. With a silicone rubber cap it will survive 8 hours in salt water at 3x seawater salt concentration. It also survived 8 hours in soda. It survived a 4 story drop to concrete. I ran over it with my car. It is still working after a year.

Anything can fail so redundancy is key. Luckily, storage gets cheaper as my needs get greater. I now have most of my stuff on a pair of manually-mirrored 4 TB drives, recently purchased for $160 each. (Yeah, I'm a little compulsive about ripping media. But always carrying a phone that shoots multi-MB pictures and 1080 video eats space fast, too.)

The only solid-state storage I have is in mobile devices. (And I still have my old disk-based iPod, dag nabbit.)

Anything can fail so redundancy is key. Luckily, storage gets cheaper as my needs get greater. I now have most of my stuff on a pair of manually-mirrored 4 TB drives, recently purchased for $160 each. (Yeah, I'm a little compulsive about ripping media. But always carrying a phone that shoots multi-MB pictures and 1080 video eats space fast, too.)

The only solid-state storage I have is in mobile devices. (And I still have my old disk-based iPod, dag nabbit.)

Same here. I have two 4TB drives for images and then several drives of smaller size, maybe 14TB total. Then I have several usb sticks, some sdcards, ipods, and all those combined are maybe around 100GB. Solid state is for temporary use, until it's transferred to my laptop.

And even some flash drives were spinning disc. Microdrive. I remember back when CF was cheaper (per GB) and bigger than all the other flash. Then the others came hard, Sony with the ever proprietary, and SD seems to be winning, especially the smaller versions.

"More" as in "I have more data on it"? Or "More" as in "I use that storage medium more often"? Nowadays, most people use SSDs more often than spinning disks, on their tablets/smartphones; but they're more likely to have much more data on spinning media.

I have a rather substantial video game collection, as well as smaller but still non-trivial music and video collections. Storing it all on SSDs would cost me somewhere between two and three thousand dollars. And so I keep very few games on them - only those that really suffer from loading times (Skyrim, Far Cry 3/Blood Dragon, Civ 5, BF2 and UT3). Everything else is going on spinning rust, along with my user folders.

Both of my main computers (primary desktop and laptop) have an SSD for the OS and for most programs (180GB and 120GB, respectively). They are coupled with high-speed hard drives for games and media storage (2TB and 750GB, respectively, although the desktop has another 2TB in various smaller drives).

I'm not sure how to measure which is "used more". By capacity, it's clearly hard drives. However, by I/O usage, the SSDs might win out.

Would I one day like to use pure solid-state? I think so. Adding the SSDs is the single biggest performance improvement I've ever done, and the power and noise decrease is nice. But I don't see it being cost-effective for me for at least another three or four years.

Similar here. I found the performance of the RAIDz array smoothed out with a SSD ZIL drive. (Not the cache, the write-ahead log. The cache increased best-case performance, ZIL helped worst-case.) Most of even my tablet/laptop usage pulls data off the server, but the SSD boot drive on the desktop was a massive speedup, even if I mount the user data via NFS.

Like most, I boot from an SSD but use HDDs for storage and backups. Since my HDDs rarely spin up, are they in use? They're actively storing my data, but almost never perform any I/O. If just storing data counts as use, I have lots of old hard drives in my closet that I use the hell out of.

To me its the best of both worlds. I keep all my media on the my server, and only keep my programs and games on my computer. Infact I run PLEX and Transmission torrent server off Ubuntu. If I want to download a torrent, I dump the.torrent file into a directory on my file server, and Tranmission automatically starts downloading it putting the completed download into a Completed directory for me. This leaves my primary computer free for gaming, surfing, etc.

They looks like a nice upgrade to a classic harddrive, not much more expensive with build-in 8GB flash cash for hot data.
Seagate makes em in 500, 750 and 1000GB. Would be interesting to know if that cache would last long enough and if the drive still works if it fails. If 2x yes then that would be a darn good solution.
I also saw a 60GB cache module somewhere. It can be used like a normal ssd, but when you hookup a harddrive to it, it acts as a cache to the hd. Can't find the link back anymore.

I've been thinking about getting one of those, but a mere 8GB cache seems inadequate. Does anyone with experience of these care to comment

I replaced the drive in my 5-year old laptop a few months ago with such a drive from Seagate. The hybrid was only about 15% more than a conventional drive of the same capacity. Doubling my disk space in the upgrade was nice. Going from a 5400 rpm to a 7200 rpm drive (at less power draw) was also very nice. Having the large flash cache has helped just about everythin

Depends on how it's used. Ideally, you want the read cache to be managed by your OS and in RAM, but it's quite rare in consumer uses to write more than a few hundred MB in a burst. Spinning disks suck at this if they're random reads, but a few GBs of non-volatile storage that you can use to buffer writes can give a big performance win. The drive can report that it's committed the data to persistent storage immediately and the data can be reordered into a pattern that minimises seeks (by the controller th

When I have a hard drive fail, I will think about replacing it with SSD. But I'm not going to spend money on them just to have bragging rights about boot time.

One of my customers just bought a new custom built server, with HDDs for the data storage, mirrored 2TB drives. The OS drive is two 120GB SSD drives. Two months after buying it, one of the SSDs died, and messed up the image of the other preventing it from booting. Had to get the replacement drive from the guy who built it and reload Windows Server fr

It's not just boot time - all applications load "instantly", your IDE will start faster and searching through source code is much quicker on SSD, to name a few benefits.

Most of us who use SSDs are willing to sacrifice reliability and storage space for speed. I have 3 SSD's in two laptops and one desktop machine and so far none failed, but I am prepared for any one of them to fail at any time. If it does, I'll readily buy a new one a replace it - because I feel their cost is justified by their speed. All

Have three desktop machines at home (Win 7, Win 8, Debian Linux) and all three have a single SSD and nothing else. Two are Corsair Force drives and the newest is a Samsung 840 Pro. Lightning fast - I'd never go back to HDDs.

I think that SDDs being more failure prone is debatable these days. Some of the earlier ones were pretty unreliable, and I'd avoid OCZ like the plague, but other than that I don't think their failure rates are any worse than normal HDDs (which aren't exactly pillars of reliability to beg

I have a much larger percentage of my data on traditional HDDs, but my SSD has my most frequently accessed files, OS, and applications, so probably gets the highest proportion of reads/writes. So depending on the metric it could go either way.

All of my computers boot and have their frequently used programs stored on SSDs, for maximum responsiveness. However all of my media is stored on a my server in an array of spinning WD Red drives (10TB, yeah baby!). With gigabit ethernet, I have no problems streaming the media as needed.

Each type of storage has it's strong and weak points... the key is to use them appropriately.

I think most people are still using hard disks for large-scale primary storage for one reason: they're cheap. I can get a two terabyte Serial ATA Rev. 3.0 (600 MB/second data transfer rate) for just over US$100. Two terabytes of SSD storage would cost 12 to 20 times more expensive--yikes!

I've got 32 gigs each in my phone and tablet. And a variety of SD cards in various cameras. My gaming rig and two laptops have hybrid drives with 8 gigs of SSD each and various amounts of spinning storage. My media array has 14 2tb drives, none hybrids. My DVRs have 8tb of spinning drives. My old netbook has a 500 gig spinner. So I picked the first choice because, even if I include all of my flash media, solid state storage makes up a tiny percentage of my storage.

Nothing is faster than a RAM drive. So the idea is a good one. However, 512GB or RAM is expensive. That, and most likely it's ECC too because there isn't a single desktop/consumer class machine that can handle that much memory. Adding a server or high-end workstation (which uses a server class mobo anyways) as a base platform raises the cost considerably.

There are 16 lane PCIe SSD cards out there. If you need that much speed and bandwidth, SSD cards are second in class to a RAM drive. That, and TRIM can kee

I've had people tell me I was wrong/lying when I said RAM cost $100 per MB when Windows95 came out. That is why i waited to 1996 to buy a computer. In '95, the 32MB of EDO memory I wanted would have meant a base of $3200, before even considering motherboard, CPU, and the rest.

The next year, memory was at $1 per MB. Yes, a 99% drop by the summer of '96.

The 4MB ram upgrade I put in my 386 in 1992 only cost $200 at the time... so ram prices were discontinuously high in 1995 if thats the case. My ~$1300 Compaq Presario 7180 came with 8MB ram in November 1995, and that included a 1.2GB hard drive and a P100 processor. I doubt the ram was the majority of the price of that system.

Do I think you're making it up? No. Do I think you might have been looking at some weirdly expensive memory? Probably.

Depends on where you lived. In '92 4MB of ram was in the 250-400 range here in Canada, that was standard 30pin SIMM. And the price dropped through the floor the following year. Then again, I remember when a 40MB drive was just shy of $500 in the early 90's, and by the mid 90's I could get a 1.6GB HDD for $169.

In 1992 we were buying 1 MB SIMM RAM for 50 USD, when ordered in bulk for our company, SIPP had a 10% or more cost-up. Then there was a big fire in one of the producers' facilities (I guess it was in 1993), that doubled prices overnight to 100 USD/MB range. Then prices lowered gradually, probabably it was due to relaunch of new production facilities in Japan and Korea...

I install most everything that I want to load quickly on my SSD, including various games which remain static. Everything else gets to go on a hard drive, especially things that are likely to change and shift a lot. So all my caches are dynamically linked to hard drives. But that is just how I do it because it improves performance in the areas I want while reducing the odds that I'll wear it out early.

However if I did a lot of video editing or something else where I handled lots of large files constantly it would be a different story. See I don't care how long pictures and video take to load from my hard drive, but if that was all that you did all day it would be a lot faster to have them on a SSD. And by doing that you could gain a good bit of productivity. You might wear out the SSD a lot faster but if you are using it for business then hopefully you can just write off the new SSD's as a cost of business.

I install most everything that I want to load quickly on my SSD, including various games which remain static. Everything else gets to go on a hard drive, especially things that are likely to change and shift a lot. So all my caches are dynamically linked to hard drives. But that is just how I do it because it improves performance in the areas I want while reducing the odds that I'll wear it out early.

There is really no need to be discreet about "wearing out" an SSD. A present-day SSD should be able to handle a bunch of frequently-changing caches (and those are exactly places where you really benefit of the speed). Remember that SSDs are designed to tolerate swapping too, which involves a lot of disk traffic.

Wearing the drive might become a concern in specialized scenarios where the machine writes to the drive full throttle 24/7. Other than that, you can do all the stuff that you would do with an HDD.

Wearing the drive might become a concern in specialized scenarios where the machine writes to the drive full throttle 24/7. Other than that, you can do all the stuff that you would do with an HDD.

Probably not fashionable advice on/. but I second this.

I've plenty of customers running Intel 520s. Other than the basics (such as turning off background defrag), they get exactly the same usage as a hard drive would.

I've had my share of insta-gibbed SSDs so naturally everyone is backed up to-the-minute (BackBlaze, if you are interested) but I don't baby the things. I almost expect the drives to eventually shit themselves due to a firmware problem before they run out of writes. That said, I've had no faile

Re: performance -- only thing I can imagine needing it for is some giant compile. I don't compile so don't use it. SSDs are too unreliable, too unrecoverable, and too small for everything else. I bet I am not alone in saying that I load extremely few programs from disk all day long. Most are already loaded. And I stay booted up. Just don't see the attraction of SSDs -- until they are >> than 4TB in size.

Benchmarks I've seen show that compiles pretty don't matter you get CPU bound. Some even had a slight degrade with SSD (probably a fluke but still shows that SSD is in the noise zone for that use case). Really where it kills is app loading and booting and such.

I installed a SSD for the OS on my Windows 7 DVR. Boot up time was almost 5 minutes with the AV drive. Now it's under 10 seconds. By bootup time I mean from power on until I can start using applications since with the AV drive it took forever after logging in. It was mind blowing how much faster Windows starts up with a SSD in this case. I think part of the slowness was it indexing all of the media on the 3TB drive.

On my Linux systems the performance improvement is not nearly so much. I think part of the re

Yarderhay, somebody old enough to remember ether for winter starts. Tire chains, too, eh? Along with a couple of sand bags, a short-handled shovel and some burlap bags in the trunk.

From when it was in beta I've been using Soluto on my Windows installs. It makes for an easy way to keep track of start up times and lets one delay or turn off various auto-start items. Also makes it easy to distinguish between power-on, to login, to usable desktop. On my old Vista 64-bit I saved over a minute from power to

This should only really matter if you're rebooting an awful lot (or equivalently hibernating to disk and not to memory (or hybrid disk/memory).

Modern OS's (even windows) are all very good at using "unused" memory to cache disk pages - and with 8GB or more common these days, that pretty much means any apps you use more than a couple times between reboots will be cached in RAM --- so they'll be exactly as fast if it was RAM-caching-SSD or RAM-caching-spinning-disks.

If all you do is facebook or email or other minial data tasks, then sure. If you actually deal with large data sets, SSD is most definitely a benefit for storing data on to work with. Couldn't give a shit if my PC spends a minute to reboot once a fortnight/month if my data is accessible quickly. Conversely, booting in 10 seconds is pointless if all my data is slow.

I never understand people who advocate this. For data that you mostly access read-only (i.e. OS and apps) there's very little benefit from an SSD because that's data that will live in the OS RAM cache. The big benefit from SSDs is that they can do lots of random writes. I can easily get 10-30MB/s of random 4KB writes from the SSD in my laptop. With a mechanical disk that would be closer to 200KB/s...

Interestingly, as RAM becomes cheaper and cheaper per gigabyte, in the following years we might be at a situation where you could affordably buy as much as RAM than is your HDD capacity. This would mean that the operating system could constantly keep pretty much all of your files in the file system cache.

Nah, at that time you had motherboards who supported 128k RAM at the most, look up the 1983 PC-XT. This was the era before compatible PCs. Cheap HDD became available earlier than plentiful RAM. In 1986 standard compatible PCs had a 20-40MB HDD and 512kB RAM.

Apropos bad wording:
* spinning HDD plate or CD/DVD/whatever are still solid, we aren't technologically advanced enough to store data in a whirlpool, tornado or the accretion disk of black holes
* even if you don't see it, there's still something spinning inside an SSD (the electrons for instance).

When an HDD fails, you can still get the data off of it. It's expensive, but it can be done.

Normally it's so expensive that you can't afford it, so lets assume it can't be done (afterall, if the data was that important you could have raided it for 1/10th the cost)

When an SSD fails, it seems that more often than not your data just disappears. I think this is why the industry is moving towards only using SSDs for caching to platter drives, because honestly I don't believe SSDs will ever be reliable enough for critical storage.

When an HDD fails, you can still get the data off of it. It's expensive, but it can be done.

At current prices, you can buy several TB of flash for the cost of recovery on a single HDD (which may or may not succeed, depending on the failure mode). If your data is important enough to you to even consider that, then you should probably be backing it up regularly...

I don't' know how slashdot works. Your name has a "foe" button by it, and I read all your posts without a problem. Because it doesn't do anything, I can't remember foeing anyone, and I never set it up to punish foes, or boost friends, and I read at -1 anyway.

Friend and foe are just annotations that give a user-defined bonus or penalty to the score. We don't know what you've set it to, but I think it defaults to -1, so if your settings result in it having a score above your threshold then you'll see it. And nothing says that you have to give positive scores to friends and fans and negative scores to foes and freaks: I set my freaks modifier to +5, because it's always interesting to read what people who strongly disagree with me think.

Saw somewhere recently, probably on/. recent reliability numbers that were far in favor of SSD something like 1.5% vs 5% failure/yr. For servers assuming you have a maintenance agreement I wouldn't care, if the disk drive fails a new one shows up in a few hours and rebuilds off of the rest of the array. The performance you could get for db applications for example so make it worth it. Much less worry about multiple different tables getting hit etc. Still a performance impact but transactions aren't waiting